Ok, so I came across this small feature of Drew Brees while browsing through the latest Australian Men's Fitness magazine. I thought that some of you might find it somewhat interesting, since it's from an Australian point of view, and also because it's about something else than the miserable Giants game. So, I wrote down the article, as I was reading it, for your reading pleasure - and that is also why there might be some typos as I wasn't paying attention to what I was writing.

Australian Men's Fitness: January 2013, p. 104-5

Shoulder of Fortune

By Matt Tuthill

Quote:

Celebrated quarterback Drew Brees overcame a torn shoulder to land a $100-million contract in 2012 and became the highest-paid player in the American NFL.

When the 2012/13 American football season kicked off on September 5, Drew Brees, 33, star quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, stepped onto the field as the highest-paid player in the NFL thanks to a five-year, $100 million contract with his club.

Although America's most prized player didn't grow up with the size and strength typical of an NFL quarterback, he never let that stop him from chasing his dreams. A star player in high school in Texas, talent scouts said he was too short to play for the big-name colleges, so he wound up at the less fancied Purdue University in Indiana. He went on to torch their record books and become a second-round draft pick for the San Diego Chargers in 2001.

However, when Brees tore the rotator cuff in his throwing shoulder in the final game of the 2005 season, the Chargers basically left him for dead. Only the New Orleans Saints - the perpetual down-and-outers rumoured to be leaving town in the aftermath of the devastating Hurrican Katrina - were willing to take a chance on him.

A marriage of misfits was made, and it turned out to be one for the ages. Brees not only bounced back from tthe injury to play his best football yet - surpassing the NFL passing-yards record set in 1984 by another gridiron great, Dan Marino - but elevated the team beyond any status it had ever enjoyed, culminating in New Orleans' first-ever Super Bowl win in 2010 and the game's Most Valuable Player award for himself.

Despite Brees' success and that celebrated $100 million deal - $40 million of it is to be paid in the first year - there are those who doubt the $100-million man. For start, he no longer has Sean Payton, the Saints' head coach, as his mentor. In March, Payton, 48, was suspended from the NFL for allegedly instituting a "bounty" program that rewarded his team members for deliberately injuring opposing players to knock them out of the game.

One thing is for sure: Brees isn't among the doubters. "I always tell myself, 'This adversity is here for a reason'," he says, "Maybe I've never had to handle something like this before, but I'm going to learn a lot from it."

Drew Brees's Core Workout

For the past nine years, Brees has been trained in the off-season under trainer Todd Durkin at the Fitness Quest 10 gym in San Diego. High performance in any sport is dependent upon core strenght - here is a six-exercise core circuit performed with little to no rest between exercises to elevate your heart rate. This is only an excerpt of Durkin's two-hour full-body program, but it's a valuable one.

Directions: Do the circuit three times. Don't rest between exercises and only for one minutet between circuits.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Dr. James Andrews placed the arthroscope in anesthetized Drew Brees, then looked up to view his shredded shoulder on the monitor.

"Oh, my goodness," Andrews said in his Louisiana twang to his assisting surgeons. "How are we goin' to fix all this?"

When he saw it happen, he knew it was bad. Andrews, a huge sports fan, was watching Denver play San Diego on New Year's Eve 2005 when Brees, then with the Chargers, fumbled on the goal line, then dove for the ball. As he extended his arm, a ton or so of football players landed on Brees' exposed right shoulder.

As TV viewers winced watching Brees leave the field, his right arm grotesquely extended, Andrews instead diagnosed: subluxation erecti. That's the clinical term for a dislocation that occurs when the arm is extended upward. The arm pops out of the bottom of the shoulder joint, causing a particularly horrific separation.

Five days later, in his operating room in Birmingham, Andrews surveyed the damage. The worst was the labrum, a ring of tissue surrounding the end of the shoulder blade -- it had a 360-degree tear. The undersurface of Brees' rotator cuff was also a disaster.

What's worse, this complex repair job required the medical equivalent of a two-minute drill. The surgery had to be completed within two hours or tissue would begin swelling.

Andrews didn't think about the patient's name or contract. He focused on how to implant a series of anchors in Brees' shoulder. Working with his full set of arthroscopic tools, checking a monitor above the operating table, quarterbacking his team of surgeons, Andrews implanted 12 of those anchors, which reattach torn tissue to bone. That was the the most anchors he had ever used in an operation, and when it was over -- when they'd beaten the two-hour clock and sewn up the shoulder -- Andrews and his assistants walked out of the operating room and did what people do here in the Bible Belt.

They prayed.

When Brees came back to lead the New Orleans Saints to the NFC Championship Game a year later, it wasn't just a matter of divine intervention. It happened because an all-world surgeon was in the zone the day of his surgery. After that operation, Andrews told the quarterback's agent, Tom Condon, "I did it about as well as it can be done."

Says Condon, who has known Andrews for decades: "That's the only time I've ever heard Doc come close to bragging."

A great surgeon is like a great athlete -- with extraordinary physical skills, exceptional powers of concentration, an ability to work through adversity and embrace, not shrink from, a challenge. All of that describes James Rheuben Andrews, 65, who has been patching up athletes for nearly as long as Joe Paterno has been coaching Penn State and is still at the top of his game. .......

Dr. James Andrews performs elbow surgery at St. Vincent's in Birmingham, Ala. Andrews has done 40,000 surgeries, mostly on knees, shoulders and elbows.